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Parker Golden

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Photo · Video · Drone 00
Woman sitting at the 2025 Longest Table Event at Truist Stadium in downtown Charlotte for the United Way's Longest Table Event

The Longest Table 2025

United Way of Greater Charlotte brought thousands of people together around one table. My job was to capture the scale of the event without losing sight of the individual stories that made it matter.

Client
The United Way of Greater Charlotte
Location
Charlotte NC
Date
September 2025
Industries
Events + Conferences, Nonprofit + Community

Field package

Services offered

01

The Assignment

The Longest Table is built around a simple idea: bring people together.

For United Way of Greater Charlotte, that meant gathering roughly 1,500 people around a shared table for conversations about the issues, opportunities and experiences shaping the Charlotte community.

The assignment was to create a film that could capture that story.

This wasn’t just event coverage. The final piece needed to show the scale and energy of the day while giving enough space to the people and conversations at the center of it.

That meant approaching the project as a short documentary rather than a traditional recap video.

02

The Approach

Production started months before anyone sat down at the table.

Over roughly five months, I worked through the creative direction, production planning, interview strategy, logistics and coverage needed to tell the story properly.

On event day, the production combined multiple cameras, dedicated audio, interviews, detail shots, crowd coverage and aerial perspectives. With approximately 1,500 people moving through a live event, there was no opportunity to recreate a moment later. The crew had to stay mobile and anticipate what was happening while still working toward the larger story.

I directed the production while working alongside two additional videographers and dedicated audio support, giving us the ability to cover different parts of the event simultaneously.

Interviews became the backbone of the edit.

Rather than simply explaining what happened, voices from across the organization and community helped establish why The Longest Table exists and what bringing people together can accomplish.

The result was hundreds of gigabytes of footage, interviews and audio that had to be shaped into a film of roughly three minutes.

03

The Result

The finished film turns a large community event into a focused human story.

Wide aerial and ground-level shots establish the scale of The Longest Table, while interviews and smaller observational moments bring the story back to the people sitting around it.

The final piece was designed to do more than document one day in Charlotte. It gives United Way of Greater Charlotte a polished storytelling asset that communicates the purpose behind the event and the connections being built across the community.

From approximately 500 GB of captured media, months of planning and a multi-person production came a three-minute film built around one idea:

Sometimes the most important thing you can do is get people around the same table.

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